Connecticut western news., 1887-04-27
POVERTY A CRIME"
HENRY GEORGE ADDRESSES A
 NEW YORK AUDIENCE.
His Own Theories Rehabilitated in
 Forcible Epigrams.

MT. Henry George has the faculty Of saying things that he has said before in new, at tractive and even more forcible way. He gen. orally, too, has something fresh and original to say in all his public utterances. He dem- onstrated this the other night in a lecture de- livered in New York, the announced title of which was ''The Crime of Poverty" These were among the things he said:
 If this want and misery and wretchednes ss is not in accord with the laws of the Creator, then it must be because the laws Of the Crea- tor have been violated.
 This protective tariff, they always say, is for the protection of labor; you never hear of any protection for monopoly, but what is the re- suit?
 The phenomenon of the labor question is frequently put in this way: That there seems to be surplus of labor looking for employ ment; that there seems to be either too little work to do or too many people to do It. Did you ever stop to think that in any large sense there never could be an excess in the supply of labor over the demand of labor?
 Scarcity of work! The thing is absurd. Is your land all in use? Are your mines all ex- hausted /? Are there no natural opportunities furnished by heaven to man to yield wealth to labor? There are, but they have been seized upon by the few to the exclusion of the many.
 Statistics show that only per cent of the people residing i'll the city of New York live in their own houses. Sixty-fve per cent. of the families live two or more to floor Is there no opportunity for work in building houses for these overcrowded people,? Though we are thus crowded in most parts of the city, more than one-half the area of the city is unbuilt upon.
 Good heavens! Why can't the men who would gladly be at work building houses be this land is vacant, under our laws it is held by dogs in the manager, who will not use 1t themselves nor permit anybody else to put it to use until he pays them blackmail.
 We sometimes speak of labor as the creator of wealth. That is mistake. Labor creates nothing. What labor does is to bring forth from nature. But when labor is denied access to the land it is absolutely helpless.
 There are people who constantly misrepre- sent us by speaking as though we wanted to dispossess those who hold the land and cut it up into little bits for distribution. We don't propose any such thing. What we propose to do, and all that is necessary to do, is to apply the revenue of the land to common uses. In doing that we will make it unprofitoble for any one to monopolize land that he has not put to use.
 The great gain would be this, that the mo- ment a man who held a vacant lot had to pay on it just as much as man who held a lot of | equal situation and desirability on which was good house, no man could afford to hold va cant lots. He would either have to put up a building upon it or let somebody else take it who would.
 | Heaven knows, if there ever was & people who needed more houses it is the people of this community. And yet we tax the men who build houses and let the man who does not build practically go free of tax.
 This is called a proposition to tax farmers. On the contrary, its effect will be to help the farmer by putting a tax upon the speculator who holds the adjoining land free of taxation.
 What we care for is not that all men shall have equal incomes or be equally rich, but that they shall all have equal opportunities of using their labor upon the natural materials that their Creator intended their labor should be used upon; that they shall really be citizens of a country, not mere tenants of some other | creature.
 This great injustice is now, I believe, doom- ed-this treatment of the land upon which a whole people must live as the private proper ty of some of their number. tell you to-day this system is on the defensive, even in the United States. Its discussion has commenced and it must go on; it cannot be stopped.
 Another great struggle against slavery is be- ginning-the struggle for the abolition of in- dustrial slavery the struggle for the abolition of poverty-and here is the point upon which the issue will be made: On the natural rights of men to their dwelling place and reservoir the earth.